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The Obamanation explained

Exclusive: Joseph Farah on how Cloward-Piven strategy came to Oval Office

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators News Service.. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.

The question has been asked many times over the last five years: What is Barack Obama doing?

Why is he inviting massive numbers of illegal aliens, including children, to risk their lives to swarm our southern border?

Why has he created a national health-care system that is unsustainable economically in the long term and is creating crisis in the short term?

Why is he turning down the opportunity to buy oil from our neighbor to the north and forcing Canada to sell it to China instead?

In short, why is he doing so much of what he is doing that seems not to make a lot of sense to the American people?

The shocking answer is that they do make sense in a perverted, un-American paradigm – one I have tried to bring to the attention of the American people for many years. The purpose is to increase misery and manufacture crises.

It’s an old trick really. It was actually codified by a Marxist Columbia University professor and his research assistant in an article in The Nation May 2, 1966 – when Barack Obama was only 4 years old. The professor of social work was Richard A. Cloward, and his research assistant was Frances Fox Piven. What they authored became known as “the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis.”

Cloward and Piven specifically calculated their strategy as a way to end poverty by bringing the capitalist system to collapse through a series of escalating demands that could never be met.

One of their principal demands was the establishment of a “guaranteed annual income.” Just six years later, this demand became a part of the platform of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential nominee that year, George McGovern.

But Cloward and Piven didn’t just argue that such ideas should become political demands. They argued that action needed to be taken by like-minded fellow travelers to wreak havoc on the system. One way that was to be accomplished, they explained in their treatise, was for social workers to sign up the poor in existing social programs at such levels as to tax the system to the breaking point.

When these entitlements were no longer able to be covered by government agencies, the new dependent class would riot and rebel and create chaos that would create a real crisis for the system.

An example of the way this Cloward-Piven strategy worked quickly followed when it was actually implemented by George Wiley, the founder of the National Welfare Reform Organization. In the early 1970s, Wiley’s NWRO hired “social workers” with the express purpose of expanding the welfare rolls as fast as possible. The strategy was so effective that welfare recipients went from 4.3 million nationally to 10.8 million by the middle of the decade. In New York City, there was soon one welfare recipient for every two residents working in the city’s private sector.

James Simpson, a former White House staff economist and budget analyst, says “the vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came from NWRO’s Cloward-Piven strategy sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975.”

Remember the famous New York Daily News headline? “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” President Gerald Ford was between a rock and a hard place because of the Cloward-Piven strategy and the organizational activities of George Wiley.

While George Wiley was a disciple of Cloward and Piven, Wade Rathke was a disciple of Wiley. In 1970, after working for NWRO, he formed a new organization – the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. It became known as ACORN. The name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym remained.

This was the organization Barack Obama would serve as an attorney and as a trainer of its leadership.

ACORN wasn’t just about registering Democratic voters. It was about registering so many that it created a crisis in the system – the same way Wiley created a crisis in the welfare rolls. Fraudulent voters were just as good as legitimate voters.

Where did the money come from for such abuses? ACORN was heavily funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

Did it work?

You bet. The idea behind ACORN’s voter registration campaign, which continues to this day, even benefiting now from direct federal taxpayer support, was to register as many Democratic voters as possible, legal or not, and assist them in voting – the more times the merrier. The system had to be overwhelmed with registrations, multiple entries, dead voters, random names, contrived names. When it all became impossible to police, the lobbying for minimal identification standards for voters would begin.

And that’s where we are today with the push for universal voting. Everybody votes. Nobody can be denied. Identification should not be required. It would be discrimination to ask people for ID to vote.

Just 22 years ago, Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN affiliate. Obama boasts in his autobiography about how successful he was at registering voters on Chicago’s South Side.

He was so successful, he was elected president in 2008.

Today, Obama is still employing the Cloward-Piven strategy, but not as a community organizer. Today he is the Community Organizer in Chief.

He’s still creating crises as a means of empowerment. He does it in domestic policy. He does it in foreign policy. He even uses the military to create crises.

Think about it: With Obama, everything is a crisis – carbon dioxide levels, the banking industry, the automobile industry, the health-care system and especially the economy. The idea is not to alleviate crises, it’s too exacerbate them. If they are not real crises, they can be used to impose new draconian top-down actions that will put more stress on the economy and empower government to the max.

The goal remains the same as when it was first outlined in 1966. It is, as the Marxists of the 1960s and early 1970s explained, to “heighten the contradictions of capitalism,” bring the system to its knees and, ultimately, collapse.

Do I exaggerate?

I don’t think so.

It’s the only paradigm that makes sense given the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Senate. They are following a deliberate course to destroy the American free-enterprise system, your freedom and the American way of life.